


Mercury Rising

by Innocent Culprit (JoJo)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU end-S3, Gen, Hurt Dean Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-16
Updated: 2011-04-16
Packaged: 2017-10-18 04:19:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/184902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoJo/pseuds/Innocent%20Culprit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Sam didn’t quite have the balls at the time to explain that, yeah, Dean was special, but it didn’t stop him from being a complete dick sometimes</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mercury Rising

**Author's Note:**

> written for mimblexwimble, for the 2009 LJ spn_summergen fest to the prompt "Dean was always special"

Dean was always special.

And this wasn’t something someone told Sam, or something he learned. It wasn’t an opinion he formed over time, something he’d observed to be true. It was a fact that he’d been born knowing, a belief seared into his gut, his heart, his brain.

No matter how much Sam had been labeled extraordinary, with all his nerdy psychic brainpower, he never thought it was true. No matter how much people murmured that John had been unique, slipping out of Hell as soon as the door opened a chink, Sam never thought that was true, either.

It was Dean who was special.

Occasionally, some other people seemed to think it, too. Only they generally had a different take on the whole thing.

Like that drawly voiced woman from the Learning Support team who’d called Sam out of class to come and persuade Dean not to destroy any more of the school library.

“Your brother’s kinda special, Sam,” she’d said anxiously when Sam’s mouth dropped open at the sight of the destruction Dean had wrought.

“Because he reads words wrong and throws books around the room?”

“Yes. Because he... reads words wrong and sometimes he gets a little angry about that and we’re just trying to help him.”

Sam didn’t quite have the balls at the time to explain that, yeah, Dean was special, but it didn’t stop him from being a complete dick sometimes.

Or the principal of some school they’d been at for a few months in Nevada.

“Is this guy special, or what?”

Dean was fourteen at the time, had just punched a teacher, and Sam remembered wondering how in hell a complete idiot like the principal could appreciate his brother’s unique qualities. Then he realized the man was being sarcastic - minutes before excluding Dean from the school premises permanently.

Dad generally didn’t seem to think Dean was special at all. On that occasion, he thought he was a complete pain in the ass and went to great lengths to explain (again) that if Dean thought he could knock down every sonofabitch who so much as rolled his eyes at Sammy wrong then he was going to end up in a penitentiary, and be out of the hunt altogether.

“We wouldn’t visit you either,” John had finished.

“You so would.”

“Once a year. Maximum.”

Then there were a lot of people who assumed that Dean himself thought he was special. Which kind of made Sam laugh.

Like Melanie Darwin.

“You think you’re so special, Dean Winchester!” she’d shrieked across the parking lot behind McDonald’s in Louisville, Kentucky. “Such a gift to women! Well you’re not! You’re a loud-mouthed, cheating sonofafuckingbitch and I hate you!”

“Ouch,” Sam had said, snickering into his sleeve in the car on the way home. “So I guess this means you’re not her special boyfriend anymore?”

“She can go screw herself.”

“Dean, you asked her sister out. In front of her!”

“It was a joke!”

“Dude, your sense of humor sucks. And your timing.”

“You’re kidding me, right? Her sister said yes. In fact, she said oh yes yes yes please right there yes.”

Sure, he had a special way with women, that went nicely with his special way of ticking off teachers and cops. Not to mention a totally special way of making you want to slap the smirk off his face several dozen times a day. And, it had to be said, a special way with a hunting knife and garlic that had made survival weekends with Dad faintly bearable.

Sam always knew one day he’d find out for sure exactly what it was. That thing he believed in. He knew it wasn’t about the number of times Dean had saved his ass, or about the countless number of other asses he’d saved. He knew it wasn’t about his pig-headedness, his resilience or his impressive way with a 12-gauge shotgun.

Not even about damning himself to eternity in order that his freakish little brother could live a long and happy life.

Because _that_. That had been far from special.

Sam didn’t know the word for Dean’s monumental act, but he was pretty sure - like, ninety nine percent sure - that _special_ wasn’t it.

Selfish might have been it. Because he’d left his brother behind with enough guilt and naked fear to drive someone a lot more stable than Sam completely insane.

Selfless might have been the word too, come to think of it.

“Well that’s fucked up!” Sam had yelled at Bobby on one of the countless occasions since New Harmony, Indiana when he lost it and broke things. “How can it be both! That’s fucking... fucked up, Bobby!”

“You know what, don’t you, Sam?” Bobby said, regarding the remains of the coffee mugs on the floor. “Dean’s practically taken you with him. And I wish he hadn’t.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means Dean’s practically taken you with him.”

Sam did actually feel he was dug in with Dean, drowning in despair, and he decided there might be a grain of consolation in the thought. He left his chair to get at the pieces of shattered crockery on Bobby’s kitchen floor. Man, but he’d seriously trashed the joint since that goddamn monumental act of selfless selfishness.

“I know he has, Bobby,” he said a month later.

“Huh?” Bobby was too busy being on the trail of something to pick up that Sam was finally starting a conversation.

“Taken me with him.”

Bobby floundered through some confusion and then seemed to get that Sam was talking about his brother

“I know. That’s what I said.”

They’d been having these disjointed conversations for weeks, sometimes making contact, more often missing each other completely.

“But I think he’s maybe coming back.”

“Sam. I know how much you... I know how you feel. But he wouldn’t want this, kid. He didn’t want it.”

Sam scratched his head. He didn’t think he was flexing his mojo. Or at least, he hadn’t meant to. He just felt all of a sudden like Dean wasn’t quite so far away.

“We need to go look for him,” he said eventually.

Bobby just sighed and shook his head. Like somewhere along the way he’d gone and lost Sam, too. But he still followed along.

*

And crouched in the watery sunshine of a winter afternoon in South Dakota, holding tightly to the man in the shredded clothes who’d been lying by the roadside, Sam thought, between deep, gulping breaths, that saving himself just to die all over again would be about the most annoying thing Dean had ever done. It would have made the monumental act not quite so monumental. It would have kept the damn Trickster amused for decades.

A siren wailed in the distance. Up at the Impala, Bobby stood with both hands on top of his cap, a still frame of a man caught in shock.

Burning hot against Sam’s chest, Dean wouldn’t breathe. His eyelids were caked in ash. He was wet and slippery, smelled of blood and sulfur. Sam couldn’t shake Dean alive hard enough, couldn’t stop his own sobbing long enough to tell him what he’d needed to say since Cold Oak.

“I hate you for this, Dean, I hate you so much... do you have any idea how much I hate you for this... don’t go don’t go don’t go don’t you dare leave me here like this, you stupid, selfish sonofabitch... don’t fucking go!”

One of the very worst things was that Dean wasn’t telling him to stop being a girl already.

No, instead, he hacked tar-black lumps down the front of Sam’s shirt and bled on the grass and the siren got nearer and nearer.

The edges got blurred a little about whether and how long Dean Winchester was dead when he got to the hospital. Whatever, there was just about enough brain activity to make it worth several resuscitations.

And Bobby picked them both up months down the line and took them back to his house and Dean was never the same again. Seemed he’d lost just about everything that had ever made him special.

Since he didn’t say a word for years afterward, and in any case they were kind of busy with some half-assed apocalypse, it took most of the rest of Sam’s life to find out even a nugget of how Dean got out of Hell.

He’d taken a whole bunch of trapped souls out with him, that was for sure. Why, he’d practically flown out.

Dean had practically been a god.

And, naturally, Sam found that he wasn’t amazed at all.

-ends-


End file.
